How much would you pay for this painting of 200 Bitcoins?

Warhol turned dollar bills into pop iconography, questioning the dollar’s value and significance by sceenprinting 200 of them on canvas.

Now German artist Kuno Goda has given bitcoin the same treatment, with his work “200 Bitcoins.” The work, which was priced at 199 BTC (about $125,000 at the time), recently sold to a Seattle businessman for an undisclosed amount.

You know something has achieved a certain degree of mainstream success — or at least awareness — when it receives the Warhol-treatment. And bitcoin, a decentralized, virtual peer-to-peer payment system, has certainly captured the public imagination over the past few months.

Goda told the Tech Chronicles that the work was in large part a meditation on the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies.

“As an artist one necessarily has to think about things like intrinsic value,” said Goda. “At first I was skeptical because bitcoins have no intrinsic value. But the value of the paper of fiat currencies is negligible as well.”

He said lack of tangible value is something money, in general, shares with art.

“The value of the canvas and paint is often dwarfed by the value of the whole painting,” he said. “Maybe because of that I find cryptocurrencies so interesting.”

“200 Bitcoins” (Courtesy Kuno Goda)

He initially attempted to sell the piece on the luxury bitcoin site BitPremier, but the work ultimately sold through private sale. The payment, of course, was in bitcoin. (Warhol’s iconic piece, by the way, sold for $43.8 million at an auction back in 2009.)

Goda, who has a degree in engineering, said he plans to make future works that also deal with cryptocurrency.

Warhol, likely, would have approved.

“I like money on the wall,” Warhol once famously said. “Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting, I think you should take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall.”